After our dramatic arrival on the day of the Acqua Alta, I’m afraid the remainder of our stay in Venice was quite conventional. The city was beautiful, the food was excellent, and the main sights were packed with tourists following a guide bearing a red flag, yellow umbrella, stuffed Minion on a stick…you name it. And as we had been warned by so many, Venice was expensive.

We didn’t do any museums or churches. We mostly wandered around streets, snapping photos of the famous sights and window shopping.

Famous sights like the Bridge of Sighs…

The Doge’s Palace…

St. Mark’s Basilica…

And gondolas. Lots of gondolas.

However, we did take the vaparetto over to Murano to check out the glass production there and enjoyed wandering the main street of the sleepy little town and seeing the wide variety of styles and glorious colors of glass produced there.

The one touristy thing we DID do during our stay in Venice was ride to the top of the Campanile San Marco, the 99 meter-tall bell tower which stands opposite St. Mark’s Basilica and offers an amazing view of the city and canals.

By the time we visited the tower, the clear skies allowed us to see for miles and miles.

Once on the ground, while Louise peeled off to try to find a post office so she could mail some post cards, mom and I decided to splurge and take a coffee/Diet Coke break at Cafe Lavena, an elegant cafe on St. Mark’s Square which has been operating there since the mid 18th Century and was supposedly the “Cafe of Richard Wagner.” OK, then.

There, while we consumed beverages and croissants, we watched the throngs of tourists and pigeons attack the square.

The cost of this coffee break and a show was roughly the same as our three-course dinner back in Tavernelle Val di Pesa, but hey, we were only going to be in Venice once, right?

Our other splurge was on leather gloves. We happened to walk past a shop where mom spotted some lovely gloves in the window. The enterprising Signoria Teresa hustled us into the tiny shop and in no short order, was whipping silk-lined gloves, a silk scarf, a handbag and a hat onto my sweet mama.

We were only in the shop for about 30 minutes, and somehow Louise, mom and I each walked out with some rather expensive purchases.

I could learn a lot from Signoria Teresa’s technique…

Eventually, we made our way back to the train station, back to Florence and back to Tavernelle, an uneventful process and one that really isn’t worth recounting.

Bottom-line, we saw Venice. It is a beautiful city and I’m so glad we made the journey, but we all agreed that we really don’t need to go back. We’ll leave it to the cruise ship passengers and bus tourists.

Ciao, Venezia!